“Life is trial and error, and culture is a collection of some of our best practices handed down from generation to generation, but even they aren’t one-size-fits-all. We have to make our own mistakes to figure everything out. When we were kids, we had to bump into something before we stopped running in the house; we had to burn our hands before we stopped playing with the stove. And now, we gotta get our assess kicked a few dozen times before we get the hang of whatever the rest of this life is.” ~ Humble the Poet, Things No One Else Can Teach Us (Page 267)
Quotes about Mistakes
Leo Babauta Quote on Using Mistakes As Feedback
“Use mistakes as feedback. They’re not signs that you’re a bad person or have no discipline. They’re signs that you need to adjust.”
Leo Babauta, Essential Zen Habits (Page 71)
Beyond the Quote (39/365)
In his book, Essential Zen Habits, Leo Babauta shares a simple story about mistakes that might help you shift your paradigm from looking at mistakes as catastrophic failures to seeing them as opportunities for indispensable feedback. Imagine you are walking across a pond using a small stone path. It’s not the most stable path and it zig zags across the water, but can none-the-less get you to the other side. If you wanted to get to the other side safely and dry, you would have to carefully place each step and make the proper balance adjustments along the way (I believe in you).
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“Sometimes the best teacher is our most recent failure.” ~ The Minimalists, Everything That Remains
“All great men and women went through difficulties to get to where they are, all of them made mistakes. They found within those experiences some benefit – even if it was simply the realization that they were not infallible and that things would not always go their way. They found that self-awareness was the way out and through – if they hadn’t, they wouldn’t have gotten better and they wouldn’t have been able to rise again.” ~ Ryan Holiday, Ego is the Enemy
“A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.” ~ George Bernard Shaw, via Blog of Jonathan Fields
“There is nothing wrong with making mistakes. Mistakes are part of life an essential for growth. It’s like that saying, ‘Happiness comes through good judgment, good judgment comes through experience, and experience comes through bad judgement.’ But there is something very wrong with making the same mistakes over and over again, day in and day out. This shows a complete lack of self-awareness, the very quality that separates humans from animals.” ~ Robin S. Sharma, The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari
“There are no mistakes in life, only lessons. There is no such thing as a negative experience, only opportunities to grow, learn and advance along the road of self-mastery. From struggle comes strength. Even pain can be a wonderful teacher.” ~ Robin S. Sharma, The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari
“However bright or dim we are, we will still make mistakes. If I kept a diary of all the bad decisions I have made in my life, it would be too thick to carry. But as in most things, it may take a bundle of mistakes to arrive at something sublime, just as it takes thousands of flowers to produce a few drops of perfume.”
Thomas Moore, Original Self | ★ Featured on this book list.
“How do I define a hero? A hero is a person who courageously contributes under even the most trying circumstances; a hero is an individual who acts unselfishly and who demands more from himself or herself than others would expect; a hero is a man or woman who defies adversity by doing what he or she believes is right in spite of fear. A hero moves beyond the ‘common sense’ of the promoters of the status quo. A hero is anyone who aims to contribute, anyone who is willing to set an example, anyone who lives by the truth of his or her convictions. A hero develops strategies to assure his outcome, and persists until it becomes a reality, changing his approach as necessary and understanding the importance of small actions consistently taken. A hero is not someone who is ‘perfect,’ because none of us are perfect. We all make mistakes, but that doesn’t invalidate the contributions we make in the course of our lives. Perfection is not heroism; humanity is.” ~ Anthony Robbins, Awaken the Giant Within
“We may believe that mistakes have been made already and that we cannot go back to the past to change things. When we look deeply into the relative nature of time, we see that the past has created the present. If we seize the present moment with mindfulness, we are in touch with the past. We can actually go back to the past, while staying firmly rooted in the present moment, and heal the past. We forgive ourselves for our mistakes, knowing we didn’t have enough wisdom or the right conditions at that time to do better. We transform our regrets in the present into compassion and understanding, and in this way we also transform the past.” ~ Thich Nhat Hanh, Savor
“The reality is that everybody makes mistakes. The issue isn’t whether you will make them, it’s what you will do about them. It’s whether you will choose the path of humility and courage or the path of ego and pride.” ~ Stephen M. R. Covey, The Speed of Trust